


Crosshairs

by kittykatthetacodemon



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-22
Updated: 2014-08-22
Packaged: 2018-02-14 07:33:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2183277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittykatthetacodemon/pseuds/kittykatthetacodemon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier does not remember Bucky Barnes, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know something is missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crosshairs

His world ends on a train in the middle of winter, with a scream and an outstretched hand and a fall that is, for a brief moment, endless.

* * *

The first thing he remembers is the cold, always the cold.

He remembers many things, after, but none of them matter.  Everything has a sort of déjà vu that tells him he’s been in this place before, in many places like this, surrounded by gray concrete and men in suits who give him orders but look at him with fear in their eyes.  They give him pictures, names, numbers.  Sometimes, he remembers waking up in the cold on other days, with other pictures, other names.  He remembers how those missions ended, with screams and blood in the snow.

Sometimes, he does not.

There are many things he knows, and things he does not know, and things that he does not remember how he knows them, or why he  _should_  know them, but none of these things matter.  After the cold, the only thing that matters is the gun they put in his hand.

He never chooses his targets, but he always pulls the trigger.

* * *

[Something is not right.

_Steve_ , he thinks, the moment he opens his eyes,  _Steve, Steve_ —and his arm is not his arm, is nothing more than a hunk of metal and wires, but the red star painted on his bicep reminds him of another star, another piece of metal, another set of hands, and it’s not until he hits the ground, twitching from the shock of a Taser, that he realizes that he had been screaming it.   _Steve, Steve, Steve_ —he doesn’t know who or what or why, but the echo of the name rings in his ears.]

* * *

He has no name, no code name, no call sign—at least, none that he knows.

A few have called him  _devil_ , called him  _machine_ , called him  _inhuman_.  The men who work with him sometimes call him the  _wolf in sheep’s clothing_ —but he knows he is just the wolf, knows he has no need to hide what few will ever see and fewer still will live to remember.  Once, a woman with hair as red as her blood had looked up from the killing ground and called him  _Winter Soldier_ , and something about it had struck a chord.   _Soldier_ , he thinks—and he feels the ice in his veins, the cold moments of awakening, the rightness of the gun in his hands— _Winter Soldier_ , and he knows it is true, even when he forgets everything else.  He lets the woman live, and tells himself that it is not gratitude that stays his hand.

He does not call himself anything at all.

The men in suits, the ones who wake him up in cold concrete rooms and give him missions, they have no need for names.  They look him in the eyes and call him  _you_ , they tell him  _you will kill these men_ , and he does, he always does.

* * *

He kills in Russia, in China, in Cuba and Vietnam.  He kills all over Asia, over Europe, through Africa and the Middle East, and doesn’t think at all about America until the day they send him to New York to arrange the death of a wealthy businessman.  The men in suits are nervous, more so than usual, and this time they do not put a gun in his hands.   _No weapons_ , they tell him,  _no evidence_ , and he stages a car accident so convincing that it looks natural even to him when he watches it from the sidewalk, just another innocent bystander in the rush and bustle of the streets.

He does not know the city, has no true memories of  _New York_ , but he knows how to walk with the crowds and where to go to vanish from sight, knows the turns and twists of the streets and the way the buildings rise up and up and  _up_ over his head.  Everything is new, everything is different, but somehow everything is exactly what he expects.  He is never lost, even without so much as glancing at a map.  He is surprised to find a mall where he had been expecting a warehouse, a dock, a seedy bar, and can’t imagine  _why_  he’s surprised, why he’s breathless with it.  The men who work with him give him strange looks the first time that he slips into the local accent without noticing, as easily as breathing.  English is as easy for him as the curls of Russian are to them, as Russian  _should_ be for him, but now it seems full of twisted vowels and harsh consonants that, for the first time, feel foreign on his lips.

He does not know the city, he tells himself, and almost believes it.

He does not know the businessman, either, but when the newspapers read  _Howard Stark, dead on impact, painless_ —it takes him a moment to identify what he’s feeling as  _relief_.  And another thing:  _regret_.

There is something about this mission that pulls at him, tension tightening like a rubber band about to snap.  Back in his gray concrete room, he pulls back at it, stretching as far as he can, even as they strap him into the chair, even as they put the clamps around his head, even as the man in a suit moves to flip the switch.  There is something to be found, and he knows it.  He knows—he  _knows_ —

* * *

The next time he wakes up, he remembers the cold, and nothing more.

* * *

In one war he rides a tank, a one-man army through desolate streets, and cities burn in his wake.  In another he is a wolf, a bear, snapping at the heels of soldiers with a red-white-and-blue flag sewn on their shoulders; he is a diving bird of prey, picking off his targets with perfect headshots from crumbling rooftops where most men would lose their balance and fall.

He works with teams; he works alone.  He meets other men, other women, people almost like him—people with smoke in their eyes and itchy trigger fingers, people who keep their backs to the wall and their eyes on the door.  Some of them recognize him in return.  He has a reputation, now—he is a wolf among wolves, and the red-starred metal arm is a signature he can’t quite shake, enough to keep his memory alive.  He knows time is passing faster than it should, days and months and years sliding by between missions, and the  _Winter Soldier_  is a ghost story, now, the nightmare-tale that monsters tell their children at night.

That’s no concern of his, though.  He completes his missions.  He learns to disappear in the jungles and valleys and mountains as cleanly as he can disappear in cities, appears behind his targets just as silently and kills and kills and kills until it seems like all he knows is a shot to the head, to the heart, taking his enemies out at the knees and the ankles before bringing a knife to their throats.  He spends hours and days cleaning dried blood out of the joints of his metal arm until he feels like the smell of copper and decay is as much a part of him as anything else.

The arm, though, the arm still doesn’t feel like his.

* * *

He knows they wipe his memory.

When they wait too long, he sees flashes, ghostly images that flicker through his dreams.  If he were anyone else, he would wake up screaming—blood and fire and human remains, twisted and broken bodies, bright red against clean white snow—but he is a soldier.  When he dreams, he is a sniper in the dark, a perfect headshot that breaks the silence of the night and never misses, never hesitates.  He is the weight of the gun in his hands.  He is his mission.  Such things do not frighten him.

Sometimes, though, the things he dreams are different.  There is that city, the one he knows-and-does-not-know, and there is winter there, yes, but there is summer, too, and a small, pale boy with eyes like the sky who smiles at him, calls him by name.  Even more rarely, the boy is big and strong, grown into a man who carries a shield like a flag, like a bullseye.  Here, there is blood and fire, too, and he is still the soldier, the mission, the weight of the gun in his hands. 

Here, though, here he watches the man through the scope of his rifle, centers his head in the crosshairs, and never once thinks about pulling the trigger.

He always wakes up terrified.

* * *

There is a mission, once, in the Russian winter, where he tracks a man like a frightened rabbit across the frozen hellscape until he freezes to death of his own accord in the snow.  It is strange, disorienting, to realize that the man has, in his own way, escaped him.  That is freedom in its own right, he thinks, and he stays there next to the body for a day, two days, until two turns to ten and his masters come looking for him. When the men appear on the horizon, he gives himself a minute to imagine what could be—how easy it would be to take them all out, one by one, until he is alone again and the crisp white snow is melted and red.  Eventually, maybe, the snow and the cold would take him, too.

The minute passes, and he is the Winter Soldier, and ice and snow mean nothing against the ice in his veins.  Cold will never be the end for him—it has always been a beginning.

He could kill them all.  He wants to, even, wants it desperately with an ache he doesn’t understand.  But he doesn’t.  He stands and goes with them, leaving the body behind in the snow, and feels his fingers twitch, pulling a phantom trigger over and over again.

* * *

The Russians know, as Russians always do.  He never wakes to the bitter cold of a Russian winter again, though there is always cold of a different kind.

* * *

His new masters rarely wipe his memory.

The flashes of memory come more often, and when he is awake he is almost always aware of the Winter Soldier—what he has done, who he has been.  There is only the mission, now, each victory an attempt to stave off the vague sense of dissatisfaction—of displeasure.  He is a predator caged, and he understands that he holds a power of his own over those who would control him.  They fear him, his men in suits and their guards with weapons constantly on hand.  If he decided to kill them, it would be easy, and he knows they know it.

It is a part of him, now, the Russian winter and the knowledge that he could kill them all.

* * *

He never does.  Even he does not know why.

* * *

This man is new, though his suit is not—a variation on many suited men who have stood over him over the years, aging slowly while he has remained the same.  But this man tells him his name— _Alexander Pierce_ —which is strange in and of itself.  The Winter Soldier has no name, but to him, neither do the suited men and concrete walls that form his entire world.  This man— _Pierce_ —gives him a name, a picture, and then tells the Winter Soldier  _why_  this man is a liability, explains the world that this  _Hydra_  seeks to build.  This is stranger still—the Winter Soldier needs no explanation, wants only to be pointed, wants only the weight of the gun in his hand.  He is a tool to be used, a mission to be assigned, and nothing more.  He knows it shows in his face—his confusion, his distaste.  Pierce stops explaining, and gives him a gun. 

Pierce tells the Winter Soldier that this man must die, and that is not strange at all.

* * *

There are many missions.  He remembers gashes of them, bloodied chunks carved into pieces as if with a knife.  He doesn’t try to remember, but he doesn’t try to forget.  There are many missions, and all of them are the same, until the one that isn’t.

* * *

After a frustrating, infuriating car chase through the city in broad daylight, he finally shoots the target and completes the mission.  Of course, he is then chased across the rooftops by a strange blond man, who throws a shield like a discus with such force that he actually hears the gears and servos in his arm whine and creak when he catches it.  He throws it back with all the force he can muster, and is surprised when the man actually catches the shield, skidding back instead of being carved immediately in half.  It’s impressive, to say the least, and the Winter Soldier is not easily impressed.

He is even more surprised when they fight and he discovers that the strange man can truly  _fight_ , fast and strong and dirty, the way he likes it.  He feels like he can almost see what the next blow will be, where each strike will fall before it lands, but it seems as if the man can do the same—like they are each acting and reacting to moves the other will never make, a secondary conversation that ends the moment his mask falls and the man sees his face.

* * *

“The man on the bridge,” he says, “who was he?”

“I knew him,” he says next, and he knew him, he  _knows_  him, and that pulling feeling is back, stretching him thinner and thinner, and something  _has to give_.  He knows this man—he is the mission, and the Winter Soldier knows he should be willing to kill without question, without a second thought.  But he  _knows this man_ , has held his life in his hands, has cradled his head through the crosshairs of a sniper rifle and never even considered pulling the trigger—and he has taken the shot time and time again and missed the mark every time.  He’s a threat.  He’s the mission.  He’s  _familiar_.

He knows this man the way he knows summer, the way he knows New York—distantly, but deeply—down to his bones, he knows this man.

And he had seen the look in the man’s eyes when his mask had come loose and his face had been uncovered.  The surprise had been genuine, the shock and confusion unmistakable.  He— _Captain America_ , he remembers,  _Rogers, Steven_ —this man knows him, too.

He sits when he is told to sit, and he lets them shove the piece of rubber between his teeth as the clamps close in around his head.  He doesn’t want to forget the man on the bridge, the one who seems to know who he is, who he was.

He has been called  _monster_ , and  _inhuman_ , and one hundred other things.  He has taken  _Winter Soldier_ for himself.  But in all the years he has woken to the cold, no one has ever given him a  _name_.

_Bucky_ , he thinks.   _Am I Bucky?_

Pierce flicks the switch.

* * *

He is no one at all.

* * *

He doesn’t know why he does it.  He doesn’t.  He really doesn’t.

He does it just the same.  He hauls the Captain up onto the shore like so much dead weight, watching the blood bloom bright on the red-white-and-blue uniform, but doesn’t stay past the water clearing from his lungs, the first tiny gasp of air.  He cannot let this man die.  He cannot watch him live.

The Winter Soldier leaves.

_The end of the line_ , he thinks, around and around until it rattles inside his skull.  He feels like something has shaken loose, leaving him twisted and jittery in his own skin.  He’s soaked to the skin and freezing, but he feels like he’s on fire.   _With you ‘til the end of the line, pal, I’m with you, pal, ‘til the end—_

The Winter Soldier is melting.

* * *

Later, in the museum, with a hat pulled low over his eyes, he watches his own reflection in the glass and matches it, point by point, with the pictures on the walls.  If he were to cut his hair and ignore the metal arm, their two faces would be a perfect match.

_James Buchanan Barnes,_  the wall reads, and a voice in his head that sounds like Captain America agrees, whispers, _Bucky_.

He doesn’t remember  _James_ , doesn’t remember  _Bucky_.  The soldier in the movie clips has his face and his voice, but none of his thoughts, none of the bloody, fragmented pieces of memory that he is beginning to scrape together as best he can.  There is nothing of left of  _Bucky Barnes_ , he tells himself; whoever that man was, he died long ago.

[He knows that is a lie.  He remembers a table, remembers  _tables_ , and a small, round man with a German accent who smiles at him, sticks him with needles and cables and  _arms_  and he is mumbling a string of numbers over and over again, knowing that nothing else is safe to speak, that he is dead, that he will die, that no one knows where he is and no one will come to find him—these are not the Winter Soldier’s thoughts, not the assassin’s memories.  They are heavy and fearful and they are  _warm_ , and the Winter Soldier knows nothing of fear, knows nothing but the cold.

And, deeper still, there is something in him that remembers New York.  There is something that remembers a boy-man who is small and tall and sick and strong all at once, remembers pale skin and sky blue eyes, remembers someone who smiles up at him in the city streets and across war zones and through sniper scopes, who screams a name and reaches for him as he falls, falls, falls.  The Winter Soldier is just a soldier, has two flesh arms but both hands are just as quick as they load and fire and load again, watching a red-white-and-blue uniform from the corner of his left eye or through his crosshairs, taking out enemies before they become threats.

_Punk_ , he calls, and  _Steve_ , and is proud of his uniform, pulls his best friend from back-alley fights and hopes desperately that he never meets his death in the army, no matter how frantically he tries.  This is the man in the museum videos, the one who stands like a fixed point at Captain America’s side and looks at him like he’s brighter than the sun, and just as painful to watch.]

No, the Winter Soldier thinks,  _Bucky Barnes_ is gone for good.  

Still.  He stands there for a long, long time.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first posted fanfic ever. Comments are appreciated! Many thanks to my beta: VanVan, I appreciate all your help and support!


End file.
